A Sneaky Serial Killer That Was Caught

A high management position at a government office in London is being held by one of the deadliest serial killers ever, and undoubtedly one of the oddest. Even though he can be silent at times, this man is consistently pleasant, liked by the staff, and a diligent worker and employer. His name is Dennis Nilsen.

On the evening of February 8, 1983, he is unaware that he will soon be revealing how he killed several people and often sat with the corpses propped up in a chair while joking and laughing with the body about what he, or they, were watching on television.

He announces he is leaving and neatly tucks his pens away in his desk drawer. That is to 23 Cranley Gardens, which is a middle-class neighborhood in a green part of London. Something weird and puzzling is happening outside his house at that very moment as he puts on his coat to prepare for the chilly evening.

Dennis Nilsen

Without a doubt, Nilsen is a brilliant guy, but did he ever get caught in the most peculiar of ways? According to others, Nilsen's fixation with dying and clinging onto corpses solidified while he was serving in the army.

According to some, it even dates back to his early years. And perhaps while working as a cop he learned how to commit murder undetected. Yet it wasn't until he rose to the position of trusted civil worker in the 1970s that he truly began to yearn for companionship—less for the blood of the living, and more for the friendship of the dead. To be told, he didn't particularly like the killing part.

Especially since the bodies were already in a dreadful condition of decomposition, he didn't particularly enjoy the dissecting and dismembering part. He began killing for companionship after his one genuine living love passed away. In 1978, he invited a man back after being lonely, sad, and successful at work.

He waited until he was sleeping before strangling him. This occurred at his former residence on Melrose Avenue. The 195th. A true scary showhouse. The fact that Nilsen was an alcoholic and man, could he drink, was one of his tricks. He invited other young men—sometimes just curious tourists from the UK traveling with cameras—back for drinks. They were starved and then strangled by Nilsen.

David Nilsen's flat

They afterwards became his friends. He cleaned their bodies. As they were lying in bed next to him, he stroked them. When something on the television made him chuckle, he slapped them on the knee and supported them up in chairs, treating them like the living. Yet because bodies bloat and degrade, Nilsen didn't enjoy watching Coronation Street with stinky, broken-down lovers.

As a result, he hid them beneath the floorboards. In the garden, beneath a pile of tires, he subsequently set fire to their bodies. When a campfire was being built, neighborhood youngsters would gather to watch what they believed to be a nice man.

He drank with the dead at night and gave commands in the office all day. "End of the day, end of the drink, end of a person... floorboards back, carpet restored, and back to work," he once said in describing his routine.

Then, though, he was forced to relocate, and his new home was 23 Cranley Gardens, a lovely-looking semi-detached building from the 1930s with Tudor-style exposed wood on the façade. Hence, there was nowhere to bury or burn the dead. Yet as you are aware, serial killers don't give up easily. They cannot give up. And Nilsen continued to murder.

That returns us to the beginning. One evening, when Nilsen got home, he discovered a drain cleaning business outside his flat. The other locals remarked that they would frequently smell something awful in the air but couldn't place its source. However, consider this: Nilsen himself had protested to the landlord about it.

Michael Cattran, a paid drain cleaner, began searching for obstructions in the sewers since he could also smell what might have been a dead animal there. Perhaps a dead rat, he speculated. He then, however, pulled out what appeared to be pieces of meat.

When Nilsen saw him, he immediately approached him and said, "It looks to me like someone has been flushing down their Kentucky Fried Chicken." Cattran, however, was very certain it wasn't chicken. In fact, he believed he had discovered a piece of a human eye. Although Nilsen walked up to his flat and carried on as usual, he sent the findings to a pathologist.

During the night, when it was snowing, he was wearing his vest. He was cleaning out some drains, but there was no way he could get out of this. The next day, the police were there. It was a person's eye. They asked to look in Nilsen's apartment, and the nice man didn't say no.

It smelled bad. The officers looked surprised. Then Nilsen pointed to a closet and said, "I think that's what you're looking for." He calmly added, "It's a long story that goes back a long time. I'll tell you all about it. I need to get it out of my system."

After he was taken out of the house, a detective asked him, "How many?" Again with a calm voice, Nilsen replied, "Fifteen or sixteen since 1978." Body parts were scattered all over the house. Nothing as it had ever happened before. One of them asked, "Why?" when they got to the station. "I hope you'll tell me that," Nilsen said in response.

He killed between 12 and 15 people, and the police never caught on to him. Let's not forget that a lot of the people he killed were young, gay, homeless men. When those young men went missing, it was a shame that the police didn't care much.

If the victims had been rich, this story would be very different. And if Nilsen hadn't been so bad at getting rid of dead bodies, he might have had a lot more. He was 72 when he died in prison in 2018. The police found this next crazy person because of how big his ego was.